Coin Toss - Distribution

[deanhystad]

You are having a hard time understanding the code because the code is stupid. This does the same thing in a straight forward way.

import random

final_tails = []

for x in range(100) :
    tails = 0
    for x in range(10) :
        tails += random.randint(0, 1)
    final_tails.append(tails)  
print(final_tails)

Instead of counting the number of tails using an integer, the program saves the tails count as a history list. To show this I expanded the inner loop:

import random

results = ['Heads', 'Tails']
final_tails = []

tails = [0]
for x in range(10) :
    coin = random.randint(0, 1)
    tails.append(tails[x] + coin)
    print(results[coin], tails)

Output:
Heads [0, 0]
Heads [0, 0, 0]
Heads [0, 0, 0, 0]
Tails [0, 0, 0, 0, 1]
Tails [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2]
Heads [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2]
Tails [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3]
Heads [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3]
Heads [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3]
Heads [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3]

The list "tails" is how many tails have occurred so far. tails[-1] is the last value after ten coin flips. Looking back at the original code, "final_tails" is a collection of how many times the coin comes up tails when flipped 10 times.

I was surprised to learn that random.randint and np.random.randint are different.